A view from Barrington: Keeping a close eye on the night sky

BARRINGTON — Pete Peterson likes to watch the stars. So naturally he built an observatory, retractable dome and all, in his backyard.

Alex Kuffner Journal Staff Writer kuffneralex

BARRINGTON — Pete Peterson likes to watch the stars. So naturally he built an observatory, retractable dome and all, in his backyard.

“It’s one of those things that when you decide to do it, you just do it,” he says.

Don’t let that offhand explanation fool you. Building the observatory behind his split-level home on New Meadow Road took a lot of time and a lot of work. Peterson did it himself in 2006 and 2007. According to the blog he kept to record its construction, it took 427 days.

Peterson, 72, is not a professional astronomer. He is a mechanical engineer who founded a robotics business that supplied custom-designed machines to companies such as Taco, the Cranston HVAC manufacturer.

But Peterson is mostly retired now, and on a clear night, chances are he will be in his 10-foot-by-10-foot observatory, searching for objects in the sky.

One recent night, his telescope tracked a dwarf planet 4 billion miles away, out beyond Neptune. Discovered 11 years ago, the planet has been viewed only 72 times by other people, according to data compiled by the Minor Planet Center at Harvard. The planet does not have a name, only an identifier: 2002 UX25.

It appears as a blurry white spot on Peterson’s computer screen. To the untrained eye, it’s nothing more than a smudge of pixels. Why is Peterson so interested in it?

“First of all, because we don’t know much about it,” he says.

Over the next few nights, he will track the path the planet travels and refine what we know about its orbit. He will pass on this data to the Harvard planet center.

Peterson also looks for asteroids. Because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the planets they circle, their orbits can change. Peterson and other astronomers keep an eye on them, making sure none are on their way to Earth.

But stargazing means more to Peterson than simply compiling data. He wrote a mission statement for his observatory. It quotes in part from a book he read, calling the observatory “a place of meditation for myself and friends ‘that stills our noise long enough to hear something beyond ourselves.’”

Peterson got his first telescope when he was 9. It was made of cardboard. He ordered it from an ad in the back of a Superman comic book.

The main reason he bought it was to peek into the bedroom of a girl who lived in his Cranston neighborhood, he explains with a smile. It didn’t accomplish that goal, but Peterson discovered that it was useful for looking into the night sky.

“The bedroom thing never worked out, but the moon thing did,” Peterson says.

He got a proper telescope after finishing college. But he didn’t get serious about stargazing until he was much older and bought his current 14-inch Meade telescope. He fiddled with the telescope, fabricating components to improve its operation, and then decided that what he really needed was an observatory.

His wife, now deceased, took some convincing. When asked during an interview in his living room what changed her mind, Peterson points to where I’m sitting.

“She got the couch, and then I was allowed to build the observatory,” he says.

Peterson built the observatory himself, digging down nearly 4 feet for each of the 13 concrete footings used to hold up the structure and 6 feet down for the pier that holds the telescope. Because he was running out of money, he topped it all off with a dome made for a grain silo. It was replaced with a proper dome a few weeks ago.

Peterson enjoys giving astronomy classes in the observatory, which despite its small size can comfortably accommodate 11 people. The classes are mainly for adults, but he has also taught children.

He tells his students that the telescope is a time machine, that the light and images it captures have taken decades, if not centuries, to reach Earth.

“You’re looking back into the past,” Peterson tells them.

Peterson gave the observatory a name that has its origin in his childhood. He and his cousin were playing with the cardboard telescope. Staring up into the sky, they mused about the Disney song, with its line about wishing upon a star.